Wikia: Making Money Yet?, Or a really bad business model? Options Rating

[SB_Johnny]

http://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=4791

Two major Wikia RPG wikis have split off - WoWWiki and PathfinderWiki.

So much for Jimbo's "day job".

[thekohser]

And out goes Gil Penchina as CEO.

I know that somewhere I asserted that I would eat my hat (or something) if Gil Penchina was still with Wikia in 2013, or something to that effect. If someone can find what I'm talking about, I'll pay you $5. Found it.

This post has been edited by thekohser: Thu 13th October 2011, 10:08pm

[thekohser]

And the new SVP of Marketing was previously caught on YouTube, talking about breaking wind.

[thekohser]

I thought it appropriate that Penchina would get the Examiner treatment.

[thekohser]

I thought it appropriate that Penchina would get the Examiner treatment.

Steve Scherf from Gracenote e-mailed me last night, pointing out a rather grave mistake in how I portrayed the "Gracenote licensing controversy". Silly me, I had relied on Wikipedia to give me a background on the matter! So, I've rewritten a substantial part of the Examiner article, to now read:

Jimmy Wales frequently notes that if Wikipedia is the set of encyclopedias in the library, then Wikia is "the rest of the library". As recently as September 2006, eighty percent of the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees seats were dedicated to high-ranking Wikia employees and a co-founder of Bomis.com, Jimmy Wales' prior business venture. Embedded throughout Wikipedia are over 28,000 web links that point directly to Wikia.com pages, which is one way to "commercialize the hell" out of Wikipedia. It is interesting, then, to look at how Wikia's older sister project Wikipedia portrays Wikia's new CEO. While Wikipedia doesn't have a biography (yet) about Craig Palmer, there is an extensive article that discusses the Gracenote licensing controversy that erupted a couple of years prior to Palmer's arrival at the music classification company. There is some logic that in May 2011 Palmer quietly left a company that had capitalized heavily on the freely-authored contributions of countless volunteers, only to land in October 2011 at a company that similarly exploits the willing crowdsourcing efforts of volunteers who don't care (or perhaps don't understand) that their donations of content financially benefit only the 125 or so employees and investors in Wikia, Inc.

Why does Wikipedia focus so obsessively on Gracenote's supposed "controversy" over licensing? Steve Scherf, the Co-Founder and Chief Architect of Gracenote thinks that they:

...may be confusing <the CD database's server source code> with the *data*, which is another story altogether. The facts there are also not in dispute, to those who bother to check into them. Most folks don't bother. They'd just rather gripe.

[Michaeldsuarez]

Greg, look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/RMeiss

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Fish_hat

Read the tweets from RMeiss, ptzut, and n_bonina from March:

http://twitter.com/RMeiss

http://twitter.com/ptzut

http://twitter.com/n_bonina

The Gracenote licensing controversy (T-H-L-K-D) article was planned and executed by a group of student free music activists who organized and communicated online.

[Meepsheep]

I think Wikia is a good Social Network/Blogging site.

[thekohser]

The Gracenote licensing controversy (T-H-L-K-D) article was planned and executed by a group of student free music activists who organized and communicated online.

Good thing Jimbo put the clamps down on paid editors, huh? That leaves Wikipedia for only the impartial, non-paid editors to craft the "neutral" point of view, right?

[communicat]

The Gracenote licensing controversy (T-H-L-K-D) article was planned and executed by a group of student free music activists who organized and communicated online.

Good thing Jimbo put the clamps down on paid editors, huh? That leaves Wikipedia for only the impartial, non-paid editors to craft the "neutral" point of view, right?

WTF do you of all people know about NPOV?

[Vigilant]

The Gracenote licensing controversy (T-H-L-K-D) article was planned and executed by a group of student free music activists who organized and communicated online.

Good thing Jimbo put the clamps down on paid editors, huh? That leaves Wikipedia for only the impartial, non-paid editors to craft the "neutral" point of view, right?

WTF do you of all people know about NPOV?

Excellent retort!

If you keep working at this then, maybe, one day your opinion will be as highly regarded as an armpit fart.

[thekohser]

Maybe it was edits like these that motivated the Wikia board to have remorse about Gil's talents running a wiki site.

Or maybe it was questions and answers like this one.

This post has been edited by thekohser: Wed 19th October 2011, 3:16am

[Michaeldsuarez]

Maybe it was edits like these that motivated the Wikia board to have remorse about Gil's talents running a wiki site.

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:...tising_on_Wikia

Gil didn't really have a good grasp on wiki editing.

This post has been edited by Michaeldsuarez: Wed 19th October 2011, 1:31pm

[thekohser]

Jimbo's going by the Quantcast system, not Alexa.

These ranking systems are not foolproof, and you can see Wikia's already back down to 105 from the recent 75 claim.

Now I realize why Jimbo is always citing Quantcast as the arbiter of Wikia traffic rankings. Quantcast is a provider of ad network banners to Wikia, so (of course) they're going to make sure that every page view of Wikia (human, bot, or scraper -- who cares?!) is counted, because it's then in their financial best interest!

Silly me for thinking that Jimbo would have just happened to pick Quantcast for ranking data because it "independently" produced the ranking for Wikia from among Alexa, Comscore, and other similar services. It's always, always, always about the money.