Internet Brands, which owns Carsdirect.com, RealestateABC (a Zillow competitor we covered in March 2006) and other sites, launched a new service called WikiCars tonight.
There has been a lot of movement in the autos space as entrepreneurs drool over the high advertising demand and see the obvious flaws in dated sites like Yahoo Autos. See, for example, recent social networks that have launnched such as Boompa and Motortopia.
Wikicars is notable because of the solid resources behind them with Internet Brands, as well as their choice of MediaWiki as the wiki platform, which is the core technology behind Wikipedia and Wikia. WikiCars is allowing use of its content via a liberal creative commons license as well.
If done right, WikiCars will be a deep, and neutral, public resource for car information. To start things off, they’ve made a real effort to properly build out the hybrid car area of the wiki.
“WikiCars is allowing use of its content via a liberal creative commons license as well.”
Hmm… since they have just taken all the auto content form Wikipedia that’s the least they can do.
For instance in Wikipedia:
The Mazda MX-5 is a popular sports car built by Mazda in Hiroshima, Japan. It is known as the MX-5 Miata (or popularly just Miata) in North America, where it was one of the few Mazdas to be given a name. It is known just as the MX-5 in Oceania and Europe and the Eunos Roadster (until 1996) or Roadster (after 1996) in Japan. It was initially unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show on 10 February 1989. The Miata is the world’s best-selling sports car, with 720,407 cars produced and sold between February 1989 and March 31, 2005. Beginning with the third-generation 2006 model, Mazda consolidated worldwide (excluding Japan) marketing using the MX-5 name, though enthusiasts in the U.S.A. (and the company itself) still steadfastly refer to it as a Miata, a name that means “reward” in Old High German.[1]
In WikiCars:
The Mazda MX-5 is a popular sports car built by Mazda in Hiroshima, Japan. It is known as the MX-5 Miata (or popularly just Miata) in North America, where it was one of the few Mazdas to be given a name. It is known just as the MX-5 in Oceania and Europe and the Eunos Roadster or simply Roadster in Japan. It was initially unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show on 10 February, 1989. The Miata is the world’s best-selling sports car, with 720,407 cars produced and sold between February 1989 and March 31 2005. Beginning with the third-generation 2006 model, Mazda consolidated worldwide marketing using the MX-5 name, though enthusiasts in the U.S.A. steadfastly refer to it as a Miata, a name that means “reward” in Old High German.
I’m not too familiar with the Wikipedia licence, but to me it looks like they have to licence their content under the GFDL. See http://en.wikip...edia:Copyrights for details.
This is the sort of direction Boompa should have taken. I see a lot more mass-appeal potential here.
I think this is a really interesting concept because they are combining the expert editorial resources they have on other sites with the resources and power of a wiki community.
I’m far from impressed, I must say.
Boompa is respectable. Motortopia is a very well done site. This is just a downloaded copy of freely distributed wiki software with some information in it about cars…
It’s a good thing there isn’t advertising on the site or it would have lost all credibility. That said, if the information is maintained properly, this could be a handy resource.
Wikis are cool, boompa has the wiki aspect too, as far as users contribute all the make/models and the descriptions of makes and models to the database.
On top of that is the ability for the users to upload all their vehicles, past and present, ( cars, motorcycles, bicycles, etc ), and then network with like minded enthusiasts.
I really like wikis, I also like social networks, but I think combining the too is the ideal way to go. You merge the entertainment aspect with the knowledge aspect. Just my 2 cents.
Best of luck to everyone.
Saw this coming.
Yes, they have a content licensing issue, good eyes.
Recall they acquired wikiTravel and World66 back in April
http://ross.typ...ravel_and_.html
I find the whole concept very strange. Wikipedia is doing it right…why redo it?
I like Boompa and CarGurus for my car info. Both sites have their own unique feel, as well as additional info.
Who cares? As rightly pointed out – duplicate information, nothing new, and I still think people would rather find a forum community on the specific car they are interested in then to do research and interact with real owners rather than reference a boring wiki
Hi. I’m one of the co-founders of Wikitravel, now owned by Internet Brands, Inc. I’m not directly involved with Wikicars but I did help a bit with the server setup, and I wanted to straighten out one mistake about the site.
Wikicars is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It does, in fact, contain information from Wikipedia, and making derivatives of that information requires the work to be under the FDL.
One of the sysadmins who was setting up the server was having problems with some of the MediaWiki features and asked for my help. I told him to refer to a configuration file for Wikitravel, and he copy-and-pasted over the config information he needed to fix the problem — as well as the config sections that set the licensing parameters. Oops.
It got fixed up a few days ago, after the launch. Should it have been fixed earlier? Probably. So it goes, sometimes.
I talked to Ross about this at the Wikimania last night. He said, “So, like Lessig says, this is a case where code and law got mixed up.” True indeed!