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Posted by: the fieryangel

http://valleywag.com/5065979/wikia-lays-off-30-percent-of-staff

Everybody's doing layoffs these days, but venture capital is becoming scarce....It's probably not a good sign.

Jimbo really needs to have some professional stills done by a good photographer and ditch these candid shots. The one on this article is particularly bad.

Posted by: One

Offices in San Francisco and New York--and Poland!?

I don't understand why so many industries feel compelled to have offices in the most expensive places on earth. The world is outsourcing, but many firms wanna pay rent in New York and London instead of Topeka, Kansas and Czechoslovakia. I don't get it.

And yes, that's a terrible photo.

Posted by: Somey

Hmm... I guess this might explain their recent decision to http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Forum:Uncyclopedia_domain_name.

I'm amazed Wikia has managed to hold out this long, considering what their business model is. Maybe they've finally realized that "free content" means nobody gets paid...?

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Boy, if we only had a creative and entrepreneurially minded trusted poster with a business perspective to provide analysis, comment, parody and satire of these events. I guess there are bigger fish to fry than Mr. Wales.

Posted by: Krimpet

Cities in the Sun Belt - Dallas/Fort Worth, Charlotte, Phoenix, etc. have all been growing explosively for this very reason. (I can't fathom at all why the Foundation decided to move to San Francisco from St. Petersburg - most businesses and organizations would be doing the exact opposite.)

Posted by: UseOnceAndDestroy

Wikia "communities" would be well advised to start dumping their content to safe local backups right now - web-based ventures that go titsup can lose their internet presence overnight, and it sure would be a shame to see all those words sitting on disconnected servers.

Meanwhile, the story works its way up the wikipedian http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?act=ST&f=64&t=5196&hl=&view=findpost&p=83431:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10070402-2.html?tag=mncol;posts

- it'll be fun to see how long the labourers can avoid posting a single word about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia, which still noticably lacks anything that looks like a "criticisms" or "controversies" section.

Posted by: Crestatus

Sometimes, the "prestige" of a city is more important than the economics, which is why San Francisco is so attractive.

Posted by: UseOnceAndDestroy

I've seen worse....

Posted by: Alison

Maybe so, but the prices for housing and real-estate here in the Bay Area are just ludicrous. You couldn't get a doghouse to rent for under $2,000 these days. Commuting from the South Bay to SF is just crazy and I imagine the staffers who moved from Florida to SF must have seen their rents and costs of living go through the roof. These days, nobody needs physical proximity to *anywhere*, really, not least of all in that kind of biz.

Posted by: Milton Roe

How about:




I think they fled Florida fearing some attack of the Bible Belt kiddie-porn-killers. San Francisco is the most liberal city of one of the most liberal states. Same can be said for NYC, NY.

And as for Federal US law? Well, that's where Poland comes in.

Somey: Wikia does have a business plan, as they run ads. Alas, they don't have WP's content. They steal what they can, but it's not enough.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

As an old colleague of mind used to say (amusingly for the first 40 or 50 times)

"How many people work here?"

"Oh, about half."

Posted by: everyking

I'd recommend that those communities get together, found an alternative project, and move their content there. I think the idea of Wikia is great (as much as it annoys me to see people suggesting that encyclopedia content should be deleted on the grounds that Wikia exists as a potential home for it), but even aside from these apparent financial problems, it would be prudent to take steps to get far away from Jimbo.

Posted by: Somey

I didn't say they didn't have a business plan, I was just pointing out that their business model (if you can call it that) has been shown time and time again to be unprofitable. What's more, people in the media are finally starting to twig - for the second time in less than a decade - to the fact that loads of venture capital, which would have been very useful for investment in things like alternative energy development, robotics, and all sorts of new "green" technologies, is being poured down a vast array of internet-based drain pipes - ultimately producing practically nothing of real use, and never to be seen again. (Not to mention the loss of tax revenue.)

How many times are the Western economies, the US in particular, going to be taken down this road by idiots with too much money, the sort of people who think they can take a couple of afternoons to set up some website that will supposedly turn them into millionaires, before everyone else wises up and figures out that huge wealth disparities are a bad thing for everyone? Maybe the recent tanking of the stock market will finally knock some sense into them, but I'm not going to be holding my breath!

Sorry, I got a little carried away there. I'll go take a chill pill and try to calm down...

Posted by: dogbiscuit

I had an involvement with a dot com. We had a fairly sound business model (ok, qualify that - for a dot com business - it was ahead of when you could expect the majority of parents to have an internet connection), in fact some 6 or 7 years on I've used a similar idea for real. We wanted to do a school parent communication site, earning money by micro-commissions on payments for school goods, trips and whatever, allowing parents to get their school letters within the same term they were sent and so on.

We worked out that to get our toe in the water, we needed £250k and that would let us launch in about a year, allowing for a proper test with a couple of local friendly schools. We had a contact at Ernst Young. EY wanted to give us more money than we asked for but we had to go from scrappy bit of paper to live in 3 months. They also thought that not re-mortgaging our houses showed a complete lack of back bone. We turned it down - it was clear that EY did not have a clue about what it would take to make the project successful - they were only interested in getting their commission from the VCs and walking away. I got a good idea of how corrupt the dot com boom was through that experience.

Posted by: anthony

Unprofitable to the investors. I'm sure the co-founders are making plenty off of it.



That quote explains the real business plan.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Now that should be in the prospectus. I believe that a business that makes money from attracting further investors is called a Ponzi scheme.

Posted by: Krimpet

We already saw the rise and fall of dozens of advertising-supported free web hosts circa 2002; they were proven to be nigh-unprofitable. (Anyone remember FortuneCity, Xoom, or NBCi? Probably not. ) It's not surprising free wiki hosting like Wikia would go the same way - it's like those free web hosts of yore, but with unlimited storage space and bandwidth.

Posted by: tarantino

Perhaps their investors were browsing Wikia, and after landing on "http://wikidocumentary.wikia.com/", came to a sad realization. The http://wikidocumentary.wikia.com/index.php?title=Template:Maintop&diff=3358&oldid=3313 for the three weeks that ended shortly before the layoffs, announced

Posted by: UseOnceAndDestroy

El Reg provokes a response - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/21/wikia_layoffs/. Obviously someone thinks they're a "reliable source".

Less than 10% sacked is now the claim. That would be 4 people, then.

I'd like to work out which heads are rolling, but I can't get the page at http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_Staff to load. Probably just a network hiccup, I'm sure...

Posted by: The Adversary

Cade Metz is just beautiful: "Sad news for Jimbo Wales: He may not get that personal jet." The wikia staff-page loads fine for me- Is the whole technical team located in Poland?

Posted by: the fieryangel

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10070402-2.html

1. Greg Kohser
2. Jimbo
3. Rachel Marsden, who wins the Miss Congeniality award for her post :

Posted by: cyofee

Looks like another source is rapidly descending from reliable to unreliable.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

If it is all venture funding, they may take a look at what is left in the pot and ask for it back. What has Wikia got - some commodity web hosting and a failed search project that nobody could conceive of being practical - apart from that well-known technical wizard Jimbo. If I was a VC and had the choice of getting 10% of my money back now or 0% in a year's time, I don't think I'd struggle too hard.

Posted by: sarcasticidealist

I think it's likely that the comment from "Rachel Marsden" is actually a troll. Jimbo's strikes me as about fifty-fifty likely to be genuine (you'd think he'd contact the writer privately, at least in the first instance, or go the full-fledged "letter to the editor" route), while Greg's is almost certainly genuine. There doesn't appear to be any meaningful authentication process for setting up a commenting account, so we shouldn't assume that people are who they say they are.

Posted by: cyofee

The Marsden account may be a troll, but Jimbo's been registered there since 2007.

Posted by: sarcasticidealist

Huh, right you are - strange that this is his first ever comment, though. I believe this is the sort of thing that makes people cry "sleeper sock" over at Wikipedia.

Posted by: UseOnceAndDestroy

Yep - and undermining the source looks like a fairly desperate defence from ol' Jimbo.

The best Wikia can do is try to reduce the story to dickering about the number that has been sacked - and hope that's interpreted as "everything's all right, then".

In the absence of some inside information, we don't know the actual number. The rebuttal on the Reg story is carefully worded on this point - "recently let go less than 10% of its salaried employees". Interesting adjective they have there. So...err...that's 4 salaried, and a bunch of contractors? How are the Polish guys employed?

No one's in a hurry to update to http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_Staff, unsurprisingly.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Yep, anyone who ever dealt with Wikipedians would smell that weasel word a mile away.

Posted by: The Joy

Are all their technical staff Polish?

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Maybe they were shipped to Poland to reside in simulated basement apartments. Saves 40% over North American or Western European wages. It would be 60% but the pierogi hot pocket substitutes didn't work out.

Posted by: The Wales Hunter

Given Green Wikia was launched with something of a fanfare, it's amazing to see how quiet it is over there...

http://green.wikia.com/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

Which is just further evidence of their problems.

Posted by: Unrepentant Vandal

Posted by: maiawatatos

Cost of living in poland is fantastically low though. Have often thought about going freelance and then quietly moving over there. No smoking ban in the cafes yet either.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Anyone who has dealt with corporate lawyers. A lie not by the actual statement, but rather by its implication and misdirection. Every time.

If you punch a timeclock, or you're any kind of consultant, you're not a salaried employee.

Posted by: EricBarbour

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/876086738.html

Posted by: Piperdown

legal prostitution? go jimbo! no need for nasty tattle-tail spunkburlgar canadiens any more!

Posted by: UseOnceAndDestroy

You think that's bad, go have a look at the Wikia Search "social" stats starting from http://re.search.wikia.com/metrics/queries.html.



Distinct trend there.

(If anyone can point me to some solid registered/inactive user stats for Wikia search, I'd be most appreciative.)

Posted by: anthony

"Well, just a second there, professor. We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally."

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Posted by: Milton Roe

Lamont Stormstar will be so pleased.

Posted by: EricBarbour

That crap has been pulled by Silicon Valley companies for many years. Mostly, they carry people as "consultants", part-timers or temps--and keep them on, year after year, like that. In direct violation of California worker law. Just to save having to pay them overtime and benefits, and to make them easier to fire. Every so often, a http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/03/24/BU40282.DTL&type=business who was treated in this fashion sues, and raises a stink.

The corporations really hate having to pay their hardworking technical staff overtime--so they classify them all as hourly wage workers. The result has been a http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10357223?nclick_check=1.

Wanna stir up trouble at the WMF? Get friendly with a few of the temps who are undoubtedly working there---and put a little bug in their ears about striking for better treatment, overtime, and fringe benefits.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yes, well, what IS the essential difference between the wage-worker and the salaried employee in California-- between white and blue collar? Yes, the first one punches a timeclock and is paid by the hour, and overtime if they go over. And you get a lunch hour, etc. The other gets salary and is expected to work through lunch if necessary, and till the job is done. But that's not all. A company can't just convert one type to the other, willy-nilly, at pleasure. The way the law is written, the salaried employees, the white-collar dudes, have to spend a certain amount of their time SUPERVISING other employees. If you can't show you do that, you can't go on salary. And if you DO do that, I'm not sure they can get out of paying you overtime.

Consultants and temps are a different matter. So far as I can tell, they get some of the worst of both worlds, especially if the consultants work and get their benefits from yet a third "temp" like agency which takes a cut. Many temps punch a clock. Many consultants, their white collar counterparts, bill by the hour (or are billed for by the hour by their firm, ala lawyers who aren't partners). In neither case do they have any job security, collective bargaining ability, or opportunity to get seniority. Also, their retirement plans are invariably worse.

The same thing is happening in academia, BTW. Have of college courses are now taught by temp instructors who are hired by the year or even semester, with no opportunity to advance in the system at all. They're just mules to do the grunt work of teaching, while the people who can get grant money lord it over the system with positions and research time.

Posted by: cyofee

Looks like all the interesting comments on the CNET article disappeared.

Posted by: UseOnceAndDestroy

One step further up the wikipedian ladder of relibility - no new facts added:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/20/AR2008102003431.html

The 10% non-denial denial is now included as an update, sans the weasel word. That number needs to be verified.

Posted by: the fieryangel

It seems that the 10% figure has been confirmed (and even Valleywag has changed that), so can this thread title be changed to the confirmed figure?

In email, Greg K. pointed outhttp://re.search.wikia.com/metrics/actiontrends.html?op=edit#startDate=1220414527&endDate=1224557362 The graph speaks for itself : Traffic on Wikia Search is going down, down, down and has been for months...

Posted by: dogbiscuit

Mod note:specific figure removed

Posted by: Somey

It should be clear?

Wikia's Alexa ranking seems to be hovering around the low 300's lately, which is pretty good considering the competition, but pretty bad considering that they had to raise $14 million to get there. You'd think that with $14 million they could have hired someone to come up with an idea for an product that people would actually pay for, but maybe that's asking a bit much for a mere $14 million...

Today is supposed to be the Big Day when Uncyclopedia's URL's are all redirected to uncyclopedia.wikia.com. I'm guessing that they're all crossing their fingers in the hopes that this will push their ranking up into the 200's, which might work if they start promoting Uncyclopedia a bit more - there's plenty of quality content there if you know where to look. (A number of Uncyc users tried very hard to convince them to redirect it to "fuck.wikia.com" instead, but with little success.)

I should probably restate my own position that aside from the top-level management, I have nothing against Wikia as a website, or even as a business entity, and of course I wouldn't want to see anything bad happen to Uncyclopedia, such as a fire, earthquake, hurricane, or meteor strike.

Moreover, our very own LessHorrid vanU (at least I assume it's him) has written http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Review there, which looks like it has a much better chance of survival than the last attempt, which IIRC was deleted within the first 6 hours. This one has already lasted 4 days, though that may only be because Dave Gerard hasn't logged in recently.

Don't all go and vandalize it at once...

Posted by: flash

I hadn't realised that uncyclopedia was actually RUN by Jimbo / wikipedia - I assumed it was a sort of independent spoof site. That's a sneaky way to control criticism isn't it? Does that make it a kind of sockencylopedia?

It certainly explains why its so unfunny...

Posted by: Emperor

Classic Jimbo, changing the rules in the middle of the game.

This is why I won't write for him anymore, under any conditions. If the Uncyc "community" had any guts they'd fork it, today, before it's too late.