Wikicities gets $4 mill in VC funds, changes name to Wikia

Posted Mar 30th 2006 6:09PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: VCs, wikis

This is a couple of days old, so maybe it's only news to me - but Jimmy Wales' private wiki initiative has received $4 million in venture capital from a very hip crowd of investors. Many people love the MediaWiki system that Wikipedia runs on. I think others find it too complicated.

Wikis are interesting, but I can't believe they are going to be exciting enough to be funded by advertising. I like Wikis a lot, so I hope all these hip investors will be proven correct. I'm not sure I can see truly mass audiences editing pages and reading edited pages on very specific topics. I hope I'm wrong, though!
Found via alarm:clock

Reader Comments

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1. Is this really what I think it is? Can you really score $4M in VC just by uploading a bunch of ready-made wikis and shoving them onto a website? Jeez... the bubble really IS back.

Posted at 7:29PM on Apr 4th 2006 by Frank

2. Frank, I think you may on to something there. But seriously, to be fair, these folks are using what I'm sure they'd say is the best wiki software and providing commercial level support and hosting for it. If people are going to go nuts over wikis on a long list of topics, they might as well end up doing it at wikia - right? Wether that's going to happen is my question. I think wikis are a lot more useful than they are sexy or otherwise compelling for mass adoption.

Posted at 9:00PM on Apr 4th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick

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