Fandom (website)
| Fandom, Inc.
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 2004 |
| Seat | San Mateo (USA) |
| management | Perkins Miller (CEO) |
| Number of employees | more than 200 |
| Website |
www.fandom.com www.wikia.org www.wikia.com |
Fandom is a in 2004 by Jimmy Wales founded and Angela Beesley company focused on the hosting of collaborative wiki websites on a same wiki farm . Before that, the Wikifarm was called Wikia until October 2016 and the company until autumn 2019 .
history
Fandom was founded in October 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley as a free Wikifarm Wikicities and renamed Wikia in late March 2006 . In July 2007 the Wikifarm comprised 3,000 wikis in 50 languages. On July 27, 2007, the acquisition of the distributed crawling project Grub, formerly part of Looksmart, was announced for US $ 50,000. On January 7, 2008, the Grub-based search service Wikia Search went online, which, according to Jimmy Wales , was to be established as a Google competitor. Between May and July 2008, Wikia took over the largest German-speaking wiki hosting provider, gratis-wiki.com . On March 31, 2009, Jimmy Wales announced the discontinuation of Wikia Search.
Through the acquisition of commercial, advertising-supported wikis Websites in January 2010 Wikia Germany reaches the claims to breakeven . At the time of the takeover, the largest German-language wiki, according to the company, comprised around 1.2 million pages of content with mostly automated data from websites .
The Fandom website was launched at the beginning of 2016 , on which, in contrast to wikis, an editorial team posts content on the subject of pop culture for fans. In addition, fans should also have the opportunity to contribute their own products. According to a Comscore analyst, this is an attempt to attract enthusiasts who could already express themselves on websites such as Reddit or Facebook . In October 2016, the entire platform was renamed Fandom powered by Wikia . In May 2017, the name was shortened to Fandom and the Fandom lettering in the logo was changed from lowercase to uppercase. In October 2018, we started to change the domains from wikia.com to fandom.com .
In December 2018, Fandom bought the online game portal Curse Media from Twitch .
In 2019 the company was renamed Fandom, Inc.
services
Wikifarms fandom and gamepedia
Fandom (formerly Wikia ) is an advertising- funded hosting service for openly accessible wikis . In late 2018, Fandom acquired Curse Media, including Wikifarm Gamepedia , from Twitch. In October 2019, the move of the two wiki farms, Fandom and Gamepedia, to a common MediaWiki platform was announced.
The wiki software used is the MediaWiki software originally developed specifically for Wikipedia . His popular websites include fandom wikis on Marvel , Star Wars , Game of Thrones, and Lego .
In contrast to other hosting services, Fandom aims to establish “ communities ”. Every hosting request is accepted, new wikis are automatically created within seconds. Purely private wikis are not allowed. The standard license for wikis on Fandom is the Creative Commons license "Attribution, sharing alike" (CC-BY-SA), which allows commercial re-use of the content. However, other licenses can also be used. Wikis with the licenses “Attribution, non-commercial” (CC-BY-NC) or “Attribution, non-commercial, no processing” (CC-BY-NC-ND) also exist on Fandom.
The Wikia at that time also served as a catch basin for projects that previously existed under the umbrella of the Wikimedia Foundation, but were no longer wanted there. For example, the Wikipedia editions in the artificial languages Toki Pona and Klingon have been moved to Wikia.
From January 2009 to April 2019 there was the Wiki "Wikianswers" on Wikia and Fandom, which combined the principle of question-answer platforms with the Wiki principle . From March 2010 users could also set up question-answer wikis themselves.
Curse Media
In addition to Gamepedia , the Curse Media acquired in 2018 also includes the gaming websites muthead.com , futhead.com and dndbeyond.com .
Software and hardware
Fandom uses a modified version of the free software MediaWiki , which on Linux - servers running, serve as storage media Solid State Disks .
financing
Fandom is funded by venture capital . Investors include the US Internet mail order company Amazon.com (since late 2006) and Bessemer Venture Partners . Since its inception, the company has raised $ 39.8 million in capital in several rounds. Fandom claims to be profitable, but does not publish annual financial statements.
criticism
Many fandom wikis complained of inappropriate advertising or advertising in the body of an article. It is not easy for individual wikis to switch from fandom to conventional, paid hosting , because fandom often owns the relevant domains. If a wiki leaves fandom, then fandom continues to "operate" the abandoned wiki with its original title and content in order to continue generating advertising revenue, which has a bad effect on the Google ranking of the new, self-hosted wiki because Google often calls the new wiki Duplicate content classifies.
Fandom has been accused of improperly benefiting from its association with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ fandom.com/about
- ↑ Shannon, Victoria: Wikipedia Founder Staffs For Profit Wikia Spinoff. International Herald Tribune , September 28, 2006, archived from the original October 21, 2006 ; Retrieved October 28, 2006 .
- ^ "Jimmy Wales and Wikia Release Open Source Distributed Web Crawler Tool" ( Memento of September 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ). Wikia, Inc. press release. July 27, 2007; LookSmart SEC filing , 2007.
- ^ Wikia Acquires Distributed Web Crawler Grub. In: TechCrunch. July 27, 2007, accessed November 25, 2010 .
- ↑ zeit.de
- ↑ Wikia takes over Gratis-Wiki.com. (Press release). (No longer available online.) Intern.de, July 16, 2008, formerly in the original ; Retrieved October 11, 2012 . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ blog.jimmywales.com
- ↑ Wales bears Wikia Search to its grave . heise.de, March 31, 2009.
- ↑ Deutsche Wikia takes over WebsiteWiki . heise.de, January 25, 2010.
- ↑ recode.net : Wikia Launches Fandom, a New Place to Get Your Nerd On, January 25, 2016 (accessed October 10, 2016)
- ↑ a b yahoo.com ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : Wikia, Inc. Rebrands Wikia.com as Fandom powered by Wikia - press release of October 4, 2016 (English, accessed October 8, 2016)
- ↑ Wikia becomes fandom on wuv.de.
- ↑ Why are the domains changing? - Section in the help page "Domain Transfer to Fandom", at Wikia (last changed on January 18, 2018)
- ↑ community.fandom.com
- ↑ How to make money with wikis: Wikia - Taz business model , May 12, 2009
- ↑ FANDOM and Curse Media join forces - Fandom , December 13, 2018; see also (so far only in English) under en: Curse LLC and …: Gamepedia
- ↑ First information about the new platform - Fandom , on October 9, 2019; mainly related to the MediaWikis from Fandom and Gamepedia
- ↑ a b Licensing. Wikia, accessed October 11, 2019 .
- ↑ Toki-Pona-Wikipesija on Fandom; Klingon on fandom
- ↑ Erick Schonfeld: Jimmy Wales Quietly Launches Wikianswers. Techcrunch.com, January 31, 2009, archived from the original on March 30, 2010 ; accessed on November 26, 2019 .
- ↑ frag.wikia.com
- ↑ Free wiki hosting company Wikia to let you create your own question and answer sites . Digital.venturebeat.com, archived from the original on March 30, 2010 ; accessed on November 26, 2019 .
- ↑ version. Retrieved November 8, 2019 .
- ↑ http://www.livestream.com/oreillyconfs/video/pla_3beec3a2-54f5-4a19-8aaf-35a839b6ecaa ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Blitstein, Ryan: Amazon puts faith - and money - in Wikia. MercuryNews.com , December 6, 2006, archived from the original January 5, 2007 ; Retrieved February 18, 2007 .
- ↑ ivp.com
- ↑ techcrunch.com
- ↑ techcrunch.com
- ↑ theguardian.com
- ↑ Seth Finkelstein: Read me first: How will Wikia cope when the workers all quit the plantation? In: The Guardian . July 30, 2008, ISSN 0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed November 8, 2019]).
- ↑ techcrunch.com
