A New Site for Anyone, Anything

WSJ reported Four years ago, Jimmy Wales launched a free online encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Now, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, and Mr. Wales is building on its success with a new venture. This time, he intends to make a buck.

Mr. Wales's closely held company Wikia Inc. has begun promoting its first for-profit endeavor, an ad-supported site called Wikicities.com that is based on the concept behind Wikipedia. Through Wikicities, groups of Web users can create their own free Web sites and fill them with, well, nearly anything. Among the topics being discussed on the nascent site: Macintosh computers, college hockey and real-world cities like Los Angeles, Beijing and Calgary.

Any visitor can easily change a wiki's appearance or the information it contains using tools included on the site. Later, if another user disagrees with a change, he can cancel it just as easily with the click of a mouse. Changes appear instantly and are tracked in a "history" tab on the page. Each topic is overseen by an administrator, who has the power to block users who have records of contributing little more than vandalism. Still, for the most part, democracy rules.

To the uninitiated, that free-for-all approach to editing sounds like a recipe for chaos. But it's a model that has made Mr. Wales's better-known project, Wikipedia, one of the most-visited sites on the Web. In the past year, traffic to Wikipedia has doubled to 5.3 million unique visitors in February, topping such well-known destinations as the Drudge Report, Yellowpages.com and Craigslist.org, according to research firm ComScore Networks Inc.

Wikipedia now has more than 1.3 million articles in several languages and is constantly updated by its visitors, from addicts who spend hours a day adding pages to casual Web surfers who correct spelling errors, then move on.

Jeff Jarvis blogged It's just starting so it's hard to tell whether this will work as well as Wikipedia. I think that wikis work best when they try to gather the ongoing wisdom of the crowds on lasting topics; they work when they hit a critical mass of interest, people, contributions, and time. That's why I remain dubious that Wikinews will work; it's too transient: By the time enough people swarm around a topic to add their collective wisdom, the world has moved on. Wikipedia did, in fact, do a good job collecting news during the tsunami, but that had enough interest, people, and time to make it work. WikiCities is a third model: A portal where people can create free, ad-supported special-interest wikis. On the one hand, I wonder whether people won't just do that on their own sites, in their own communities. On the other hand, perhaps special-interest wikis need a portal to gather that critical mass of contributors. We'll see...

On this blog Derek commented Seems to me that one of the more under-utilized functions of blogs is the local blog---a blog writ small. I live in Ann Arbor, MI. A local blog of events, politics, and news, etc., with reader reviews and reporting, would be a great service and widely read in a blog-friendly town like this. Certainly less centralized an approach than wiki....

But how does a local blog get attention and recognition in the wider, louder blogoshpere? Certainly word-of-mouth. But a portal for local blogs with links would be more effective. Suggestions?